Vicky Cristina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? Part three*

So? So I’m thinking and writing about the film that was meant to be Woody Allen’s return to form, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. I’m thinking about it not so much in terms of what it appears to be but sits behind that appearance. I’ve been thinking, given the contusions** of its surface (and my dilletante-ish readings of Zizek) of it as a representation rather than a film. Or, in Freudian terms, as a symptom or presentation of underlying neurosis.

I decided there were two alternative thoughts/diagnoses.

One, it is a satire about the making a film like Vicky Cristina Barcelona. There are Gaudi bits of the city. There are rich expatriate Americans — Henry Jamesian without the quality tailoring. There is Penelope Cruz playing ‘crazy Spanish woman’. There is Javier Bardem playing ‘crazy Spanish artist’***. There is lunch. There is Spanish sex — with two young American girls. So not so much Spanish sex then as Woody Allen sex.

It is a view of Barcelona which gloriously reflects the maker’s own projections — because that is the stuff from which it is made. The city, the characters, their actions, these are all things which have no independent life outside Woody Allen’s head. They are thin, substance-less, one-dimensional — almost heroically so. The director’s singularity of vision peers inwards to what he already knows — or, rather, thinks he knows but actually doesn’t. That’s its deliciousness. Henry James again: it’s as if Daisy Miller had written Daisy Miller.

So, taken as a whole, all these elements of cliché, pastiche, reductionism and seemingly unfiltered symbolism combine to produce a film which is an accurate and enjoyable parody of an imaginary Woody Allen movie set in Barcelona. It’s the film that you or I would make if we wanted to make a comic reflection of the film we’d imagine that Woody Allen would make about Barcelona.

Read that way, it’s possible to pass a passable ninety minutes or so. And thank Woody Allen for giving us a late flowering of a new found capacity for self-reflection (as opposed to his earlier self-regard, self-fascination even).

So: Vicky Cristina Barcelona as a wry comedy of manners about a film-maker’s id-fuelled myopias and fabulously ignorant cultural prejudices. Attractive young girls! Spanish artists! Flouncing Spanish women! Gaudi bits and bobs! Barcelona, mi amigo! Las Ramblas! Tapas! Attractive young girls! Etc etc.

The second possibility? Wait till tomorrow.

* How many parts? Well, it’s currently looking like four, with a postscript (or two).

** Yes, I did mean contusions.

*** Who seems to have a private jet licence, too. Not to get too literal and picky about this, but I know a Barcelona-based artist, successful enough to have had a piece in MoMa. He runs bars to survive. He’s rich as rich by Barcelona artist standards.

Meanwhile . . . Tourists to London (and admirers of Tessa Jowell) might be interested in this.

Vicky Christina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? Part two*

Like everyone, I lost Woody Allen somewhere along the way. Can’t remember when. Probably in the early/mid-1990s, maybe earlier. That apart, I remember seeing a bit — on cable — of the one about Wimbledon. There was a murder in it, I think. It was so bad that, well, I can’t even be bothered to summon the will-power to finish that comparison.

So to his Vicky Christina Barcelona. I’d read and heard that it was a return to form. Yes, I know it’s a couple of years old, at least but . . . see above. I saw it was on cable. I missed it half a dozen times or so. Then I told myself: no, you must watch it. So, for once, I made myself sit down at the start and stay there till the credits.

Well?

Not well.

To understand what I write next, you probably need to have seen it or have me provide you with at least an outline description of it. Again, I can’t be bothered. Work it out yourself from the title: two girls, Americans, Spain. Add what you know of Woody Allen’s work and you’ve got a good idea.

So . . . there are only two possible explanations/readings of this film** . . . Which I will start explaining/reading in the next post.

* How many parts exactly? Well, more than two, it seems. I’ll keep you posted.

** I’d been reading*** a certain amount of Zizek and so found myself somewhat influenced by his stand-up philosophy.

*** When I write about ‘reading’ Zizek, I don’t, of course, mean reading in the sense of opening a book, studying it, finishing it. No, I mean reading newspaper interviews with him, glancing at the cover of a photocopy of his 1989 essay Which Subject of the Real? that’s on top of a Really Useful box in my office and rewatching his wonderful Channel 4 documentary, The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema. Well, some of it.

Towards a future post . . . Go here, paste in some text (your own, mine, a writer you like) and it’ll tell you which famous writer’s style it’s closest to. I’ve done mine. Hence the forthcoming post. Only not till I’ve finished with Woody Allen and Freud on football.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? Part one*

I rarely go to the cinema these days. Partly because of the smell — damp carpets in ‘heritage’ ones, popcorn in multiplexes. Partly because I go to the theatre a lot and, what with having to watch a publicly acceptable and democratically accountable amount of football, time is short. Mostly, though, I just forget to go. At least, that’s the way it feels.

When my children were young I’d go all the time. My daughter, in particular, loved seeing every new children’s films. Sometimes several times. Once, we found ourselves the only customers in Swiss Cottage Odeon for Mrs Doubtfire. It was like being in your own sitting room. If it was the world’s biggest sitting room.

My younger son loved cartoons — a taste I share with him and was happy to indulge, with Saturday mornings spent at Bugs Bunny retrospectives and Fritz Freling symposiums. (Some day, I’ll share with you my thesis that all cinema aspires to cartoondom and that CGI is a step in that direction — only counter-productively complex and expensive.) Sadly, my son’s true favourite cartoons were Japanese — Digimon etc. If you’ve never seen one, keep it that way. Sitting beside him in the dark, I’d find myself weighing up the merits of suicide.

I genuinely can’t remember the last time I went, or to which cinema. The last film I can actually recall seeing at a cinema was a Lord of the Rings thing. Maybe the first. Maybe the second. It was that younger son who took me — as in, got me to take him and his friends. I fell asleep. I was ravished by the New Zealand landscapes, though.

I do watch movies, of course, but on TV. Mostly on cable movie channels — because I pay for them so it seems churlish not to watch them, like an anorexic woman leaving half her restaurant meal on the plate. So I watch a lot of bits of movies — I’m not good at figuring out and remembering when what starts. I watch movies I’ve seen before — it’s not only small children who like to hear the same story over and over. I also tape movies I haven’t seen — and sometimes even watch those. Sometimes, I even watch whole movies, from the start to the end.

What this means, though, is I’m always behind in my movie watching. I’ve never seen the latest hit — or the one before or the one before that, generally. I could, I know, catch them on DVD — but that involves Amazoning them and, frankly, my house already has enough unread books and unwatched CDs and unplayed DVDs in it to keep me occupied and engaged well beyond my likely death.

Also, I could watch them online etc. But I already spend enough time on the computer and don’t feel I should watch pirate torrents. That’s a young people thing, inappropriate and unbecoming — unglamorous, even — in grown-ups.

So there are always movies I wanted to see but never got round to. In particular, the ones at the less populist end of the range. Cable movie channels are good on romcoms — so I get to appreciate Russell Brand’s updating of Spinal Tap in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But I don’t often see the kind of movies I used to always see on first release at my local, the Screen on the Hill in Belsize Park. (I think it’s changed its name now. Shows how much attention I pay, right.)

Which leads to what I was getting to, divergently, right from the beginning: Woody Allen. Well, it will in the next posting.

* This was originally one long posting. Then it got very long. Then I showed it to my wife who said: it’s very long and it doesn’t read like a blog, it’s like an article. So I cut it in bits and will post one a day over the week. How many bits? Well, at least one more. I’ll let you know when I’ve figured it out.

Meantime . . . a touch of French expertise

Next up Vicky Cristina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? Part two

Freud: wrong, right, wrong-headed? The fourth and final part*

A while ago now, I was taken to task about Freud etc by an old friend who has spent many years working as a mental health professional. I, of course, have no such experience. He challenged me to defend the old fella against a 4-D attack, the last of which is . . .

Divination

‘Perhaps I mean divine guidance,’ wrote my friend, adding that he sees Freudian theory as impossible to test or disprove. ‘There’s the impression of depth of insight – but that could be illusory.’

The result of this, he says, is that it ‘tempts practitioners to think they know much better than their clients what’s wrong, while human qualities such as trust and respect can get dissolved away. I’ve seen it happen. Worse, I’ve inflicted it.’

Well, I think there are two questions there — though they are linked. One is about science and knowledge, the other about professionalism and humanity. Deep Freudians would — perhaps defensively — claim that it is only psychoanalytic thought and insight which is capable of resolving the conundrum about handling actual patients, as opposed to just mouthing off about the brain and mind and people (ie what I do).

So, the first question. Again, I can divide this into two answers.

One, yes, there is a tendency for therapists and psychoanalyticisers to worship at their own altar. Or, at least, by worshipping at Freud’s altar, hanging on his every word, use the perceived glories of his thought as mirrors reflecting and focussing their own perceived originality and wisdom.

(During the Freud units of my course, I sometimes felt like I was in a psychoanalytic version of Talmudic exegesis — studying and turning over every word of God’s given texts in search of new levels of meaning. That was on good days. On bad days, I sometimes felt like I was in the ‘meaning of the dropped sandal’ scene in The Life of Brian. Sometimes, I’d point out that this was how I felt. This did not always go down well.)

Actually, to tell the truth, there can be more than a tendency for therapists to worship blindly at their own altar, particularly in the academic world. Research shows — consistently and surprisingly unequivocally — that therapy (of whatever kind) works. (That is, the patients get better/feel better/are more capable of running and enjoying their lives.) But . . . that ‘whatever kind’ is the crucial phrase. The research is quite clear that the therapist’s training background or theoretical stance seems of surprising unimportance.

What does help patients to get ‘better’ is the human relationship with the therapist. (The ‘better’ is in quotes not for any silly, naive relativist reason but to indicate how wide a range of outcomes I am using it to encompass.)

The crucial thing is that the patient likes/respects the therapist. And the crucial thing about that liking/respecting is not abstract. It’s clear and concrete: it facilitates the patient’s capacity to take ‘criticism’. That is, interpretations which, in whatever way, challenge the patient’s view of the world/themselves. In effect, we trust the judgment of those we like**.

The second part of the first-question and answer is about whether Freudian theory is provable or testable. Well, actually and contrary to most statements on the subject, it is. The best comparison is with Darwin’s theory of evolution. To all but religious fundamentalists, it’s clearly true — or, at least, it provides a superior explanation for the world than any alternative. In particular, one that enables predictions to be made. But is it testable or provable in the way chemistry is? No.

Psychoanalytic theory has a similar status. Potentially, at least. Many, if not most, of its supporters are of a non-scientific bent, quite without interest in testing or proving it. They just accept it — the way, say, Othello accepted Iago’s description of reality. (See below for another tragic Shakespearean allusion/illusion.)

That doesn’t mean you can’t demonstrate some elements of psychoanalytic supposition through experiments. Ramachandran’s famous work on stroke patients, for example, can be mined for significance in terms of Freudian conceptions of unconscious processes. A stroke-inflicted patient says her paralysed left hand is not her own but her mother’s. Yet, when asked to touch her left hand against her nose, she uses her right hand to lift her left hand — the one that she says is her mother’s — to her nose. The unconscious and the process of denial seem — to me, anyway — the clearest and cleanest explanation.

The second question is about psychoanalysts’ (and, by extension, all therapists’) essential humanity. Well, that is not easy to answer. My personal experience has been essentially positive. With one obvious exception, therapists I’ve consulted*** have been intelligent, thoughtful and considerate — perhaps overly so, viewed through my tough-hearted view of life.

Yet I’ve heard many horror stories from other people — some, though not all, of which I believe. Therapists often cross boundaries. A 1990 north American study found 'sexual abuse of female patients by roughly 7-10% of male therapists of every stripe and level of experience'. The second husband of the first wife of Freud’s grandson had a quite terrible experience at the hands and couch of one of the eminences of British psychoanalysis. He died recently. I might write about him sometime — in particular, how the psychoanalytic establishment dealt with his story.

Mostly, though, therapists and analysts are in denial about the range, extent and meaning of these failures and failings. Which brings me back to Ramachandran’s stroke-begotten woman. And the tentative suggestion that this also perhaps indicates that psychoanalytic theory can be used, reflectively, to examine psychoanalytic practice. Denial is a human constant, it seems.

It also leads to one of my current obsessions, the Dunning-Kruger Effect. That is, the sad fact that the incompetent are doubly cursed by their incompetence. They are not just incompetent but incapable of recognising their incompetence. They simply can’t see how badly they do things — so they can’t take the steps necessary to improve. The competent, by contrast, are more likely to understate their competence — not out of false modesty but because they compare themselves to the really competent.

A notable study of this phenomenon is of medical students so . . . one, we’re not talking just society’s least able, two, that really makes me worry about an impending routine visit to the doctor.

If you want to read more about this, I suggest a visit here (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/). It’s a piece in the New York Times Opinionator by the documentary film-maker Errol Morris. It taught me loads of interesting stuff about Woodrow Wilson, bank-robbers and the strangenesses of the goings-on in the neurology department of Salpetriere in the late 19th century. It’s not a short piece. In fact, it’s five pieces. Set aside an hour or two to make your way through them all.

An extract . . . Errol Morris is talking to Ramachandran. He asks: ‘Do we live in a cloud of belief that is separate from the reality of our circumstances?’

Ramachandran replies: ‘Absolutely, and overall, fortunately, it's a positive cloud in most of us. If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we'd be terrified.’

Happy reading.

* The first three parts were Determination, Distance and Denseness.

** This is, of course, one of the main motors of life’s tragedies. Macbeth, for example, chose to believe that the judgment of the object of his sexual desire was fully equivalent to an accurate, independent, peer-reviewed, chi-square-tested assessment of the realities of late mediaeval Scottish political interests and alignments.

*** That sentence poses a variant on the Nick Clegg question about sexual experience, doesn’t it. How many analysts/therapists’ couches (or chairs) have you been on? In my case, more than five but less than ten. Being more precise would involve defining what is meant by ‘therapist’. And, of course, by ‘I’.

Ameuses-yeux?

Icelandic politics part one

Icelandic politics part two

Outside Rod

Next up Vicky Christina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? And: who would Freud have supported in the World Cup?

A women’s word and how to use it

The second follow-up to my night in Cambridge, promoting my book Filthy English: the word that Maggie didn’t mention.

Before my appearance at Women’s Word, I made sure I read some of one of my friend Maggie Alderson’s novels, Handbags and Gladrags — chosen because it was on my daughter’s shelf.

I hadn’t finished it, though. I did that this week. And found in it a moment she could have — maybe should have — mentioned.

It’s on page 379 of my paperback edition and it’s the crux of the novel. (The plot: skinny fashion editor, fucked up by father’s suicide in front of her, has affair with Australian über-macho photographer and finally abandons her ‘perfect’ marriage to Ollie, an effete adulterous, upper-class English make-up manufacturer/promoter.)

She is finally confronting her less than satisfactory husband, in their Notting Hillbilly apartment*.

Him: ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

Her: ‘You cunt. You self-satisfied, judgemental, superficial cunt.’

The chapter — it’s the penultimate one, of course — closes quickly . . .

‘By the look on Ollie’s face, I knew those words had done the trick more effectively than any pyrotechnic display could have.’

I wish I’d read it before. I would have got Maggie to read it out. What do you call yours, indeed?

* Place and brand names are as essential and well-worked as they are in a Chuck Berry song. As the newly-wed couple of You Never Can Tell ‘furnished off an apartment with a two room Roebuck sale’, so Maggie’s couple have copies of Derek Jarman’s Garden and a book about Yves Saint Laurent artfully placed on a ‘kilim-covered ottoman’. No ‘Coolerator, jammed with TV dinners and ginger ale’, though.

PS One night, I was watching a TV documentary and I liked it so much that, unusually for me, I kept watching right through the credits. I saw that the director was someone called Jill Nicholls. I remembered that I’d been really good friends with a girl named Jill Nicholls when I was still at junior school. I also remembered that, a couple of decades ago, someone called Jill Nicholls had passed a message to me via a mutual friend, asking me if I was the same Peter Silverton she remembered from our childhood. I passed the message back, saying yes. Somehow, though, it got left at that.

Right after the TV documentary, though, I googled her. Took but a few minutes. (I found her via Linked In, if you’re wondering.) I emailed her. We exchanged news. She’d been recently widowed — and wrote a most moving eulogy for her late husband, a painter. You can find it online, if you try.

She came to dinner with me and my wife. She had pictures of our childhood. We told each the story (well, a story) of our lives since we were young and short-trousered — ankle-socked in her case.

She told me, too, that she had nearly finished another documentary, about one of my near neighbours, Diana Athill. Now she’s finished it. It’s on TV tonight, Tuesday, June 29 — but I'm sure it will be repeated and repeated and repeated.

A little more filthy (Israelite) English? (I was pointed in its direction by a Canadian student in Cambridge.)

Next up The final D of my 4-D defence of Freud. Finally.

Six degrees of osteopathy

A follow-up to my last posting. Well, the first of two follow-ups actually. The next I’ll post tomorrow.

I don’t — as regular readers will surely agree — generally do personal health stuff etc here. I did, though, mention that I had a bad knee last week. Not that you probably care — I certainly wouldn’t if it was you — but I no longer have a bad knee.

For which transformation, I have one person to thank. Which is, frankly, only of interest to me and them. But I thought I’d share with you the (brief) story of how I came to find this person . . .

Garry Trainer, that is. He’s an osteopath, based around the corner from me, in Primrose Hill. A burly, middle-aged, twice-married Kiwi who likes a drink and has just taken up surfing again, he has my deep thanks for fixing my knee.

An hour or so on Monday lunchtime. A few needles — he does acupuncture, too. (I’m inherently sceptical but also acceptingly pragmatical.) A little back bending — no crackings, though. A hefty massage of the back and knee tendons.

Right away, I felt better — improved, that is. By the next day, I was limpless. So, for what it’s worth, this free add.

But I also thought I’d share with you how I came to put my body in Garry’s un-tender care in the first place. And how it connects to my (relative) closeness to Adolf Hitler's hand and Oscar Wilde’s penis.

Garry first, though. About two years ago, in the wake of the exams I sat for the first year of my course, my back got really bad. The worst I ever had. I couldn’t walk. I ended up not seeing the local shops — not much more than a hundred metres away — for nearly a month. I couldn’t get from one floor to the next in under five minutes.

I knew I had to get something done. I’d been to an osteopath years before and she’d done the trick. But she’d moved away.

Two new ones came recommended, both by people I respected. Jonathan Le Bon and Garry Trainer. I checked both their websites. I discovered that Le Bon was brother to Simon Le Bon, the popster, while Garry had had his hands on Gwyneth Paltrow. Well, which one would you have chosen to get closer to?

Me and Adolf Hitler? Well, I’ve shaken hands with not just one but two people who, as children, had their hair ruffled by him.

Oscar Wilde’s penis? I’ve shaken the hand of a man who, in pre-war Brighton, had his hair ruffled* by Bosie, Oscar Wilde’s boyfriend, nemesis and, I should guess, penis-handler.

I can also get to the Pope in one. Freud? Loads via London analysts, of course — particularly via Anna Freud. But also via an American cousin who is related to Joseph Paneth — a close friend of Freud’s who lent him the money for his wedding and who died of TB, at 32. Paneth was also a pal of Nietzche’s.

Hence, my personal variant on the classic parlour game. I call it Six Degrees of Separation Anxiety. It's just the same as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon — only the link (or end-person) should, in some way, be odd or unsettling. I welcome all contributions to my game. Put your own links to the famous on the comments page.

* Hair-ruffling children was once a big thing in Britain — Germany, too, it seems. I was certainly a victim in my own childhood. Fears of hordes of marauding child-abusers seem to have put paid to hair-ruffling — which seems to have gone the way of spats and . . . Gordon Brown. (I can do him in one, too.)

Today, I am mostly listening to . . . Jackie DeShannon (and Jack Nitzche — no relation.)

Pins and begins

Nonchalant and want

An original demo

You’ve got to live for yourself — and nobody else

Next up The other follow-up — something Maggie Alderson didn’t mention in Cambridge.

What do you call yours?

To Cambridge, and Lucy Cavendish College, for a joint Saturday-night appearance with Maggie Alderson (old work colleague and editor of a collection of female erotica*) at a feminist book festival, Women's Word.

The subject was . . . What do you call yours?

To publicise my book Filthy English, I was appearing in front of a gathering of feminists and inviting them to discuss their favoured words for, well, their favoured anatomical parts, I guess. Presumptuous, at the least.

I suspect I was more anxious than I let myself feel.

The reason Maggie was with me was she was of great help with my book on that evening's subject**. Here is the relevant section from the book . . .

In early 2009, a group of women novelists got together and published a collection of 'unashamedly sexy stories' entitled In Bed With. Not so unashamed, though, that they'd use their real names. (Pseudonymy: sounds like a perversion, doesn't it.) Knowing one of the editors, Maggie Alderson, I got her to send me an electronic copy of the book. I did a count of the words they used, for their own parts and their partners'.

In this 334-page dirty book, there are: seven cunts, four pussies, three vaginas, three labias, three bushes, one vulva, one fanny but no twats or front bottoms; five tits (all in the same story), four titties (all in one other story), twenty-two nipples and fifty-seven breasts (four stories have seven apiece); fifteen clitorises (four in one story) and two clits (both on the same page). Men? There are forty-three cocks (seventy-four per cent of them in just four of the twenty stories), nineteen penises (ten in one story), one dick and no pricks; nine balls but no bollocks or testicles. Sexual activity? No cunnilingus or fellatio and the only bugger is a non-sexual expletive. Fucks and fucking? There are forty-five sexual ones (thirteen in one story, a tale of revenge) and eleven non-sexual ones. There is one roger, one bonk and five shags, all of them humorous or dismissive. And there are ninety-one kisses.

A fair picture, I'd say, of which words are used for what by literate, educated, middle-class twenty-first-century Englishwomen - when their noms de porn lull them into thinking no one's counting.

Maggie and I recreated our original phone calls - complete with props. We discussed female anatomy. (I'm avoiding the actual words we used so this blog doesn't get censored or blocked.) We discussed attitudes to female anatomy and the language used - in English and Serbian, in particular. (Maggie's husband is Serbian.) I claimed that if there were a World Cup for swearing, the final would always be England-Serbia.

I talked about the fine grain peculiarities of the word wanker and Maggie bemoaned the paucity of words or phrases for female masturbation - something I write about in my book. We branched out into a discussion of the implications of the playground insult 'your mum'.

We were the last act of the whole week and, while the crowd weren't exactly the second house at the Glasgow Empire, they were a gobby lot. Smart, opinionated, voluble, aggressive at times even. A real treat for a writer at a reading.

Finally, Maggie offered a prize of a copy of her book for the best word or phrase for female masturbation. I said the competition was open to - boom, boom - all-comers. I got a laugh, thank god.

The winning entry was 'flicking the bean', provided by a 19-year old former Catholic convent schoolgirl, sitting between her psychiatrist father (who went to school with Shane MacGowan and thus, like me, knew him before he was Irish) and her stepmother - an academic and former member of the Fall.

At the after-show drinks, she - the former member of the Fall, that is - noticed that I was limping a little, in pain from a crooked knee. 'I deal with pain,' she said. Having asked me a couple of questions, she told me to clench my buttocks. 'Really hard.' I did as I was told. 'No, really hard. Till it hurts.'

Stupidly - or possibly because she was American (and a former member of the Fall) - I assumed she was some kind of alternative practitioner. Not that that stopped me following her advice. But still . . . Saturday night, being told to clench your buttocks by a former member of The Fall. Such are the wonders of life.

Then I looked her up on-line. I wanted to see just how big the pool of The Fallen is. I discovered two things. She is one of 59 ex-Fallers (by one count, anyway). And she is Head of the Pain Team at West Suffolk Hospital.


Some entertainment? Washboard art?

Next up The final bit bit of my answers to my old friend's arguments against Freud and . . . who would Freud have supported in the World Cup?

* Actually she hates the word erotica, preferring to call them 'unashamedly sexy stories'. I used it, of course, to tease her.

** First, I wrote 'subject at hand'. Then I started to make the obvious smutty joke - 'as it were' or somesuch. Then I realised I simply couldn't do that. 'Subject at hand' is just such a cliche.